Kelly Trepp, Author

It takes a lot of energy and hard work to follow a healthy diet and exercise routine. Aside from making decisions that impact your daily routine, sometimes your diet affects those around you. Sometimes it means offering up a new healthy dinner item that a family member or friend had never previously tasted and rocking their world at the possibilities of healthier food. Or sometimes it means putting off spending time with the puppy to put in more time at the gym. Or it can even mean asking your family to change their choice of restaurant for dinner so you have healthier options. It is not hard to imagine that spending all this time and energy on yourself can make you feel a little selfish, and even a burden on others, but it is important to remember why you expend these efforts. My reason? Aside from wanting to be healthy and stick around to love on my hubby for a long, long time and produce beautiful babies to love and care for... "Do you not know that you are a temple...

Today's inspirational quotes are brought to you by Mark Twain, Runners World, and boredom in the workplace. Hooray, boredom in the workplace! Dream big, but allow yourself the opportunity to start small, and have your share of struggles in the beginning. The world's great composers weren't writing symphonies the day they first sat at a piano. Kevin O'Rourke, Marathoner It is easy to become discouraged when striving to achieve a goal. It is easier still to see obstacles between yourself and your goal and throw your hands up in the air and say, "I give up!" It is important to remember that nothing worth doing comes easily. This quote is a fabulous reminder of that fact. The road to success is a long bumpy one, and sometimes it gets lonely out there. My best advice is to dig in and do the next thing. I heard a sermon once wherein the minister described the path to achieving a goal as a mountain. At first, when you see obstacles, they look like a giant moun...

"The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry." -- Robert Burns No matter how much planning we do, it's a law of science that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. Trust me, it's science . But seriously, all of these idioms exist for a reason. No matter how much planning we do, we cannot account for all events that come our way. As such, my best laid plans to train for this half marathon have already gone of the track. Staying late for work, traffic on my afternoon commute, calling financial institutions to change my legal name, and the lack of day light have all conspired against me to cause me to miss my training for the first time. Three for four isn't bad, right? There are so many things that can conspire against us to keep us from attaining our fitness goals. But even if you don't have time to get to the gym or don't make it for your evening run, here's a few ways that you can burn a few extra calories throughout the day: 1. P...

It's Wednesday morning. You wipe the sleep out of your eyes and stretch as you roll over to check the clock. Time for your weekly Wednesday morning weigh-in. A million things run through your mind. I shouldn't have had that extra slice of garlic bread with my spaghetti last night. Forget the bread, why did I eat the pasta? You take a deep breath... We've all been there. The battle with the number that we see on the scale. Society puts unrealistic pressures on us to be a certain size, look a certain way, and reduce ourselves to a number. But what does that number really tell you? When you step on the scale, it doesn't tell you your muscle mass, or your BMI or any other healthy way of measuring your fitness. So why should a number constitute a fitness goal? Let's forget numbers all together. As I started losing weight thanks to my healthier meal selections, I tried to make exercising fun for myself to speed up the process. Sort of like this, but less 80s. I'm a f...

In June of 2010, the love of my life, we'll call him FI (fiance), proposed to me on our vacation in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The ring was everything I had hoped it would be. Beautiful platinum crossing band with inset crushed diamonds with a gorgeous center stone that was everything I had dreamed of. FI was making my dreams come true. FI with his beautiful hazel eyes, luscious eyelashes, masculine muscular build and swagger. And I, well, I was about 20 pounds heavier than I ever wanted to be and in a right state to pass out when attempting to complete a mile run. Let me back up a bit... I was a fairly active teenager. I played a lot of sports growing up, and I danced two hours a day through most of high school, give or take a few months due to related injuries. As you may glean from these blog entries, I'm a giant klutz. As a consolation of my active lifestyle, I was able to eat pretty much anything I wanted in copious amounts. Fast forward to freshman year of colleg...